The Cracked Integrity of Donald Trump

The problem isn’t just that Trump doesn’t want to imitate a candidate with a semblance of rational bearing; it’s that he’s not believable when he does.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIC THAYER / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX

You have to say this for the crooked demagogues and reactionary populists of the American past: they may have stirred the bitter soup of nativist resentment with as much zeal as Donald J. Trump, but their family counselors did not take time out from politics to cruise the Aegean on a plutocrat’s yacht; their rhetorical counselors did not attempt, for decades, to instill fear in their employees through the most squalid sort of sexual terror; and their political counselors never worked in the interest of Slavic autocrats. Oh, Father Coughlin, we hardly knew ye!

Day by day, news bulletin by news bulletin, the Trump campaign spirals to new depths of strategic confusion and moral chaos. On the escalators at Trump Tower, the direction is always down, down, down.

At the center of the campaign is Trump himself, and, summoning the spirit of Sinatra’s most irritating song, he has made it clear that he will win or lose by doing it his way, by refusing to “pivot” or blandify his message and language. There is a kind of cracked integrity in this. No matter what the polls and cable gasbags say, he is going to be himself. “I am who I am. It’s me. I don’t want to change,” he told a local-television interviewer, in Wisconsin. “I mean, you have to be you. If you start pivoting, you’re not being honest with people.”

The people closest to Trump are his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner. Like the children of populist reactionaries the world over, they spent last week vacationing aboard David Geffen’s two-hundred-million-dollar collapsible dinghy, the Rising Sun, along with Rupert Murdoch’s former wife Wendi Deng. They Jet Skied and toured the old town of Dubrovnik. It is clear—both from legal documents and from Lizzie Widdicombe’s reporting—that Ivanka Trump and Kushner have occasionally been alarmed by the candidate’s public statements (particularly on Mexican “rapists”), but they are, despite their gestures toward feminism and social liberalism, completely committed to Trump and Trumpism. As their friend Reed Cordish put it, “They’re believers. They are all in. They have been all in from the get-go, without hesitation.”

With the polls suggesting a potential electoral wipeout in November, Kushner returned from Croatia and took part in meetings this past weekend that kicked Paul Manafort, the campaign manager, either upstairs or to the side of the road, depending on your reading of the spin. This announcement came shortly after the Associated Press broke the story that Manafort “helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party's efforts to influence U.S. policy.” Under federal law, it is a felony if American lobbyists fail to report their ties to foreign political parties or leaders.

This story was just a new piece in a bewildering puzzle concerning the Trump campaign’s ties to, and the candidate’s own views on, the Putin regime. In an interview I conducted yesterday for "The New Yorker Radio Hour," Jake Sullivan, Hillary Clinton’s closest adviser on foreign policy and national security, made it clear that the Russian issue would remain a focus of the Clinton campaign. Sullivan pointed to Trump’s statements excusing Putin’s anti-democratic behavior, his questioning of NATO’s commitments in Europe, and his proposal that he might lift sanctions on Russia. “Those are just some of the examples of where the Trump campaign and Trump himself have gone out and basically adopted not just the position but the logic and the rhetoric of Vladimir Putin,” he said.

Sullivan added that the release of Clinton’s e-mails, almost certainly engineered by Russian intelligence, might only be a first step. “Given Russia’s track record and Putin’s track record, it would be folly to assume that there isn’t more that they would try to do to disrupt the election, more e-mails that they would put out,” Sullivan said. “We have to proceed on the assumption that that is going to happen.”

With Manafort’s demotion, the Trump campaign will now be led by Stephen Bannon, the executive chairman of Breitbart News, and Kellyanne Conway, a pollster and frequent Trump surrogate on CNN. It does not require a liberal spirit to define the nature of Breitbart. William Kristol, a leading neo-conservative political operative and editor, calls the Breitbart operation “Right-Wing, Intolerant, Mean-Spirited News.” (Kristol ought to know. Breitbart rewarded his opposition to Trump by running a story about him headlined “Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew.”) Bannon, who is every bit as pugnacious as the now-sidelined Corey Lewandowski, will hardly attempt to tame Trump or normalize him. He will be part of the effort to let Trump be Trump.

As if that were not enough to promise an even uglier autumn, we’ve now learned that Roger Ailes, late of Fox News, is advising Trump before the opening Presidential debate, scheduled for September 26th at Hofstra University, on Long Island. That relationship is long-standing and close. Trump advised Ailes on how to “handle” myriad accusations of sexual harassment when he was running Fox News; despite this counsel, Ailes was sent from the building (though he was clutching a forty-million-dollar severance). Ailes is a deeply experienced political operative, having advised Ronald Reagan on how to handle the “age issue” before a critical debate with Walter Mondale, and George H. W. Bush on how to employ the shiv of racial fear to defeat Michael Dukakis. Ailes and Trump have not always had a smooth relationship—they quarrelled publicly after Trump’s clash with Megyn Kelly during a debate last year—but they are in sync in their xenophobic ideology and their disregard for the rights of women.

No matter how aggressive or skilled the new members of the Trump campaign team may be, their task, their set of problems, appears vast. If Trump is left to his own devices, if he does not get a decisive boost from another cache of e-mails pried loose by Russian hackers, if reporters fail to discover a level of sleaze at the Clintons’ foundation that is truly ruinous and dispositive, their route to winning the Electoral College will be trying at best.

The problem isn’t just that Trump doesn’t want to imitate a candidate with a semblance of rational bearing; it’s that he’s not believable when he does. His hallucinatory improvisations, his fact-lite flights of insult, conspiracy theory, and rage are him, the essence of Trump. His supporters sense that, and they credit it as a form of integrity and genuineness. When Trump is compelled to revert to a prepared text and the teleprompter, his discomfort is as evident as the fear of any hostage forced to read a statement of guilt into a video camera. Trump knows that his listeners know that this performance is not him at all, that he is making a gesture to campaign strictures for which he has nothing but impatience and contempt. In the end, not even those who admire and support Donald Trump most fervently will likely save Donald Trump from Donald Trump.